Hi Friends,

Been reading this forum for a while now and see a lot of you starting and continuing the journey of losing large amounts of weight and I want to put my voice in the forum in case anyone can get something from my own experiences.

When I graduated from college in 2006 I was 23 and weighed 260. Two and half years later I was back down to my original weight of 170 and I've never looked back. The part I'm happiest about is that I never felt like it was a struggle at any point of my weight loss or maintenance afterward.

I've spent a large portion of the past five years thinking about what exactly it was that I did which not only allowed me to lose the weight in the first place but also keep it off, as apparently 98% or so of people who lose 50+ pounds eventually gain it back. I know a lot of poker players are in the same boat I was once in, and having gotten so much out of this forum thought it would be a nice way to give back to this group.

A lot of of what I think about the process of weight loss probably won't sit well with some of you. For example, I think calorie counting is a horrible idea and will almost always lead to people falling into that aforementioned 98%.

I'll be sharing some of the things I've written about over the years on this topic in this thread for you to read. In the meantime, feel free to ask me anything.

Cheers,

Jason

What do you count then?

Well, I lost 80lb too but you don't see me starting an AMA about it. I peaked at about 260, I've been as low as about 163, currently 175.

Present your thesis or not, man, I ain't got time to play 20 questions

How do we know you're not just one of the 98% since you could still regain the weight? Probably need to wait until you die to be sure.

@ etm.

Which kind (intensity, interval length, frequency) of physical training (for a slightly overweight adult white male who otherwise has no relevant serious chronic disorders yet) do you find optimal for sustainable loss of:

a) total weight,

b) specifically visceral fat*,

and why (if your argument relies on certain scientific papers, links to them would be nice)?

* I.e. for the minimization of the VSR = VAT / SAT ratio = visceral adipose tissue to subcutaneous adipose tissue ratio, disregarding the lean body mass for the purpose of b).

I stopped weighing myself and started using how I felt as a guide. If I felt more energized, motivated, and was sleeping better that week than I was the week before, that meant I was probably mostly eating the right foods for my body. If I was feeling sluggish, tired, and irritable, then that probably meant I was eating things that weren't good for my body type. Other factors are in play too of course, but for the most part your own body will tell you what foods it likes if you listen.

I think there's too much emphasis placed on the number on the scale. The way most people set things up is that they deem themselves a success or a failure based on whether or not they lost weight in a week. If someone feels really energized, calm, and happy that week but either stayed the weight or gained a small amount, I say that's a success, but many would think they failed. Conversely, a lot of people grind on a huge caloric deficit, don't have much energy to get through the day, constantly wish they could be eating something else, drop a couple pounds, and call that a success, whereas I think that's a pretty bad week.

When you consistently feel good you're more likely to make healthy choices, and when you feel awful for a long time you're more likely to blow up or give up altogether.

Congrats, that's a big deal

How overweight is slightly overweight?

You sound like you know more than I do about exercise science so I won't try and give you an answer. My thought as I read your question is that people will often get stuck in the trap of spending a lot of time thinking about what exercise program to do, when the reality is that for most people, if you just choose something that causes your heart rate to spike and your body to break a sweat, then do it 4-5 times a week, that's good enough.

If you're slightly overweight and you already exercise regularly your problem probably has more to do with how you're choosing to eat rather than not having the perfect exercise routine. Investing time into building a healthy relationship with eating is probably more beneficial.

Good night all, will leave you with this very long thing I spontaneously wrote a few years ago ...

When it comes to our desires to lose weight and shed fat, I’ve discovered that the “hard” way of taking a step back, wondering about what kind of person you want to be in the world, and the real reasons why you’re unhappy with your body, is actually the easiest way to get where you want to be.

The “easy” way that most people subscribe to only begins to scratch the surface of what’s there for us to learn. Generally, the quicker the promise of transformation we seek, the more we should be looking inward to gleam the “why”, the gem that is trying to reveal itself. Things like diet pills, cleanses, and lap band surgery promise instant changes without acknowledging the critical hidden component of reclaiming and sustaining a healthy body: how did you get here, and why do you want to change?

Even longer term solutions, like choosing to eat healthier and exercise regularly, when applied in the way you would take medicine when sick, don’t address the core of the issue. In learning to step into a healthy and satisfying body, the hard way is the easy way because the easy way doesn’t last. How often do people lose a lot of weight with proper nutrition and exercise, only to eventually gain it all back at some point in the future? I’m pretty sure it’s fairly often, and it’s because they didn’t really know why they were doing it.

If you polled those who have lost a substantial amount of weight and kept it off without struggling, you’ll find a common thread in each of their stories. You’ll hear that they hit a point where feeling the way they were feeling in their bodies, and feeling the way they were feeling about themselves was no longer acceptable. And that their ability to lose weight and keep it off ultimately had nothing to do with wanting to look good to impress other people, and everything to do with wanting to increase their feeling of aliveness, happiness, and love for themselves. Their desire to show up and love themselves was the only thing powerful enough to do what they did and sustain it with ease.

I know this because I happen to be one of those people. When I graduated from college the poker lifestyle had spit me out into the world weighing 260 pounds. I not only felt like I wasn’t good enough for others, but I also felt like I wasn’t good enough for me, and that was too much to bear. I had tried, over the course of my weight gaining years, to find ways to reverse the trend. At various times, I signed up for a gym membership, started playing tennis again, and eliminated processed and starchy foods from my diet. All of those things are good in a vacuum, but there was never a chance for any of them to stick, so long as I was mired in the perspective of “I need to lose weight because I don’t like the way I look”. But once I cultivated that feeling of wanting to change how I was showing up in the world, and not just physically, all of a sudden it became easy to keep up with a regular exercise routine. I naturally became curious about eating more foods that kept my body feeling great for long periods of time, and eventually cooking became a hobby.

I’m back to my high school weight of 170 pounds now, and I have been for a few years with no real issues in maintaining it. When I tell people the story about my weight loss, they’re always surprised by two things. One, that I ever weighed anywhere close to 260 pounds, based on the way I seem to effortlessly take care of myself, and two, that the process of shedding 80 pounds sounds like it was a pretty smooth and easy long term experience for me. Each time I receive this feedback, I remember that most people choose the easy way out, not realizing that it’s just going to lead them back to where they started, over and over again.

If I were to condense my advice to all those in the world who have a constant desire to lose weight, I would say this:

- It can only work if you do it for you, not your spouse, your mother, or what you think society wants you to look like.

- It can only work if you come from a place of wanting to feel good, because when you feel good, you feel good, regardless of what you see in the mirror or what your scale reads. Feeling good leads to looking good, not the other way around.

- It can only be sustained long term if you’re willing to get curious about what it was that brought you to that place, and understand the lessons that you’ve been given. They will keep coming until you get them anyway.

- It can only work if you start with the question of “Why do I want to lose weight?”. And even then, the answer to that question has to be substantial enough, sturdy enough for you to lean on when times get tough and you can feel all your progress slipping away.

It’s not easy to get to a place where food and exercise are your allies, but it’s also not easy to fall into that place of hopelessness which so many people experience at some point around their weight. If you can make it all the way to the bottom and survive, you have more than enough inside of you to get back out. Just remember that once you’re ready to show up in the world the way you feel most called, and are unwilling to settle for anything less, the biggest battle has already been fought and won, and it’s all downhill from there.

AMA: Gained about 80+ pounds and never lost it back ... Also I'm happy

Now back to your thing :-)

I'm 6' tall. Last year, I gave up on myself (had a major depressive episode) and my weight sprang to a sudden lifetime peak of 240 lb in August (I had been at 200-210, but not heavier, on many prior occasions) because of indulging in fat and carbs as a reward.

After a visit to an endocrinologist, I removed most of the fats from my diet (switched from frying to microwave heating) and excluded potatoes. I was so anorexic (fell into spontaneous intermittent fasting eating 1-2 times a day) that, by Christmas, with zero exercise, i.e. by just correcting the diet, I dropped the weight to 165 despite the sedentary (online poker) lifestyle. That's the typical minimum of my weight (I've been there 3 times in the adult life).

As I'm in the middle of another MDE (courtesy of the bipolar II disorder), the weight is now 185 (and floating between 170 and 200 lately), which is actually slightly high (BMI = 25 kg/m^2) considering that my lean body mass is much lower than the average of my demographic (I last lifted 9 years ago and not too much). Even at those times when I'm down to 165 lb (BMI = 22), there's a noticeable amount of subcutaneous fat left in my body anyway.

But I don't mind the latter as subcutaneous fat is not nearly as dangerous for the health as visceral (internal organ) one which is mostly in the abdomen and poses a risk of type II diabetes (to which I'm genetically predisposed) and heart disease. Specifically in males, most of their fat tends to be visceral, and I'm no exception. It's the most metabolically active kind of fat so it gets used first during aerobic exercise, and that's why it intuitively makes sense to focus on exercise (I'm not sure if medium-high intensity aerobic or mixed aerobic + resistance training is better) as opposed to maintaining a hypocaloric diet if the focus is on diabetes prevention (not on muscle gains which I don't really fancy).

Resistance training is more time-efficient but I'm afraid of increasing the amplitude of anorexia / bulimia if I lose fat too fast so I'd rather lose it slower but lose its worst kind first.

I've actually found some articles on PubMed that confirm my intuition but their results are somewhat diverse so I think I should start a separate thread about visceral fat reduction once I sort the mess out and understand which of the articles are high-quality and which studies are not backed up that well.

My personal aha moment was when I got a huge edema in the feet and calves. In the hindsight, it was most likely caused by a food allergy, but back then, I believed that the obesity was the reason, and anyway, that experience gave me a sneak peek of a potential diabetic future. I don't want the feeling of my feet falling off to return ever again.

Sounds like you're very analytical and in your head about this issue. What I would do is slow down, start listening to your body, and go from there. Not how it looks, but how it feels each day. Start making connections between foods and activities that keep you feeling good, and keep those in. Make the same connections between foods and activities that lead to you feeling not so good, and take those out. If your goal is long term sustainability this way of going about things will take you there and I think you'll find that your specific goals will likely take care of themselves as you keep doing this.

Thanks for sharing

Irony?

wat

This is like playing those Omaha/8 hands with which you've been winning in the current position over a small sample, and folding those with which you've lost more than won, without ever reading Dan Deppen's book or studying with ProPokerTools, while disregarding shortterm results totally if they're negative and hoping that the winnings graph will be automatically trending upwards in the long run just because you're generally smart.

As I've said above, I have serious mood disorders so I have even more cognitive bias than an average person and can't trust my instincts and have to obey the science whenever possible.

By all means, you gotta do what you feel comfortable with based on your own situation. Not everyone will be interested in doing what I did, and that's fine. I'm happy to share what I did which helped me to lose a bunch of weight and have it never be an issue again. For those who are tired of being stuck in the weight gain/loss cycle and want to rethink their methods it's something different to try.

Wishing you all the best on your weight loss journey.

Getting leaner is not hard when you're obese/super high bf%. Stop acting like an expert.

QFT, sorry if I was coming off as an expert. It's easy to eat below maintenance when it's high. Adjusting when it becomes low is the hard part.

It's surprising that even some sane people struggle with getting leaner when their BF% is high. I think it's very beneficial for them to start counting calories and macros and consult a local dietitian.

And I actually didn't tell the whole story about myself - of course I was conscious about macros, trying to persuade myself to switch to protein-rich foods (legumes are my staple foods because I'm a vegetarian) because proteins give twice fewer calories per gram than fats and carbs, trying to eat more vegetables, and doing other standard stuff.

comment directed at OP, not coonlord47

Wat

Oops. Fixed my post as per the 4-4-9 rule.

A carb meal can't keep me full for too many hours, though, so proteins are still better. Sadly, dairy products (as well as any animal proteins) are a bit too expensive to my taste so I replace them with a bit of plant proteins